Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Reviewing versus Reader Response
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ส.ค. 2024
- Recently I had a commenter that said they had read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and that it was badly written. Also, my nemesis Philip Chase recently made some comments about reviewing and Goodreads.
So I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk about both subjects.
How to evaluate text, and how that impacts what reviewing is.
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Intro and Music by Professor Trip.
I enjoyed this video. Five stars! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ 😁 Also, you have convinced me to read The Parable of the Sower. Cheers!
You are both incorrigible and encouragable... Nemesis.
By the way, I forgot to ask, did you like the 'photo' of you?
@@ACriticalDragon That's a one-star photo 😁
@@PhilipChaseTheBestofFantasy I thought it was highly accurate 🤣🤣
This is one of my top 5 novels and I have a long history with the book. I first read the book when it came out in November 1993. I was 22 years old at that time and it blew me away. I had not read any book like that at that time. I have read the book two more times once in my mid 30s and most recently in my late 40s. I’m 52 now. Butler’s vision is dark indeed but the characters and Lauren’s belief in Earthseed is why I have read this novel multiple times in my life. This is the only novel I have argued to myself about what she envisioned with and enjoyed it at the same time. Glad you did a video on one of Butler’s best works.
Returning to books we have read after a significant time has passed can be a revelatory experience in terms of recognising how our tastes, preferences, biases, and desires have changed over time. Butler is a great author, but I am not sure I 'enjoy' her work, more that I appreciate, and am engaged and challenged by her work. Thanks for your great comments. I always appreciate seeing your perspective.
Thanks for the kind words, A.P. I have enjoyed your videos about how to become a better reader. You have given me some food for thought.
What I mean about “enjoy” is the reading experience I get from a novel. Enjoy is necessarily about a work of fiction being fun or pleasurable. But I’m totally engrossed in the fictional world that the author has created.
Butler’s stories are grim, dark but feel realistic and I have enjoyed that reading experience from what I have read of her work.
You lost me at not liking salmon 😏. Another great video on the different types of “reviews”. I really enjoy how you dissect the text to demonstrate how word choice is so important to the story. Cheers.
I used to love salmon, but over the years this has somehow shifted.
@@ACriticalDragonMaybe this will spawn a different kind of video...
I read Parable of the Sower when it came out in 1993, as my mother was (or rather, is, as she's still alive) an Octavia Butler fan. I had a habit of picking up books off my parents' shelves and I had read the Xenogenesis series front to back several times and loved it (Adulthood Rights in particular). That said, as a 14-year-old boy, I struggled with the book because the post-apocalyptic setting felt too close to reality for me to daydream idly about in the same way I had her other works. It's probably a good thing it would have been another three years until I got on the internet, and nothing like Goodreads existed at that time because I shudder to think what my teenage self would have rated the book at that time.
Thinking about the issues of Goodreads does make me wonder if there's wisdom in the way Rotten Tomatoes provides both an aggregation of professional reviews and fan reviews. There are certainly many cases of TV/movies that the critics like, but the general public seems mediocre on (The Last Jedi) and works that the public seems to love but critics do not (Super Mario Brothers). As you note, reviewers and critics are expected to engage with media that isn't always personally to their tastes. In contrast, marketing often ensures that people who wouldn't enjoy a work stay far from it.
I think this helps explain, for example, why Will Wight's Cradle series (past the first two books) generally rates far higher than a lot of classics within speculative fiction. By the third book, the only remaining audience left are those who loved the first two books. In contrast, once something becomes a "classic" in some sense, lots of people will pick it up just to see what the buzz is about, and find it's not to their tastes - confusing this for being "bad."
Weirdly enough, Rotten Tomatoes exposes a different issue. 'The critics are always wrong' Syndrome.
That is when people point to something they enjoyed and say that the critics said it was 'bad'... again conflating 'quality' and 'enjoyment' ... but they also ignore when their tastes align with a positive critical reception. They cheery pick their examples, or they class those contra examples as 'exceptions', instead of realising that no one can tell us individually what we will or will not enjoy.
In general, I am far more likely to pay attention to a critic than to audience aggregate, because, at the very least, the critic usually explains what the issues are and what the strengths are, irrespective of personal enjoyment. They may present it in a snarky way, or say that the film is bad, but because they actually supply reasoning and evidence then I can look past their preferences to the analysis and decide for myself if I might enjoy or be interested in the thing.
Enjoyment is entirely subjective. Quality less so.
This makes me feel terribly guilty over the occasional attempt at a Goodreads review I've made. Not necessarily guilty enough to change my ways though. My opinions and feelings, after all, are based on objective fact! But seriously speaking, it does get very difficult to deal with something quantitative like the star rating system when you're fresh off reading something that you really enjoyed. On one hand it would probably be better to wait for the high from that read to die down before you write the review, but on the other you're liable to forget the details as you move on to the next thing, and should write the review while everything is fresh in your mind, even if personal feelings get overwhelming. No idea how professional critics do their jobs, really. Although Roger Ebert's reviews were always full of his own experience and occsasional rambling about unrelated things and he had a pretty good career...
Ebert might have peppered all his reviews with personal observations, but he knew the foundational aspects, he knew his stuff. How we present/publish a review is a different step to how we compile the data. So he made a choice in how to present, but it was based on analysis of the text.
After finishing a book you can note down all you want, you don't have to publish the review then and there. You make notes. You write a draft. Then you can check your review. Then you can decide how to present that information to your audience. There is no external deadline for most people, so why rush?
Like almost everything, if you want to do a good job and do it properly, it requires effort and practice.
No one is saying we have to do that, or that we have to put in the time and effort to learn to do it well, but conflating the review of someone who has done that versus someone who hasn't as 'equal' and 'equivalent' is part of the problem.
@@ACriticalDragon You make a compelling case for how to do better. It might be a drop in the Pacific, but I'll try to apply your advice on this.
As ever with anything I say, take what is useful to you, and discard the rest. I am certainly not the arbiter of anything. I have my perspective and opinion, and I try to explain my reasoning so that people can better evaluate if it is useful to them.
You are correct. I was conflating my enjoyment of the book with the writing. Written in first person as a young girl going through the events described, it makes sense in the way it is written. The story was great, but I personally didn't like the writing style. I was hoping for something more to flesh out the world that was being presented, which would have had to been done differently and in third person most likely. The world described in "The Road", for example, is similarly bleak, but the writing, even though sparse, is descriptive and beautiful. That's just personally what I prefer. I did rate the book 4 stars on Goodreads because I intuitively understand that it is very good and my personal preferences shouldn't mar that.
Personal preferences are really important in our enjoyment of a text, but while you were conscientious and thoughtful in how you approached reviewing, many are not.
One of my favorite things to read in a review for something I am interested in is "not a fan of the genre; 2 stars." I just want to ask: "well what if someone liked that genre, did it do things well at least? How was it written? Why do you think it was written in that way?" Etc.
Basically we should just ignore Goodreads, probably lol.
A guilty pleasure of mine is looking at 1 star reviews on goodreads of literary classics.
@ACriticalDragon Years back reading Lolita I remember seeing some... interesting reviews online both positive and negative, so I understand that
Check out the reviews of Pride and Prejudice, or even Dracula. 🤣🤣
This was fantastic! Great job with the explanation of both reviewing criteria and the analysis of text. It's always tough trying to determine what it is about stories that gives us that sense of catharsis we are looking for. If you ever get the chance, there is a great graphic novel adaptation of Parable that was very well done. Check it out!
I might have to check out the graphic novel adaptation. It is always fascinating to see a different perspective on the work.
A.P did your books make it to America? Curious to see which books you collect!
No video in weeks? Hope you're doing ok AP!
This all makes sense.
That is odd for one of my videos. Usually I ramble off point multiple times. 😂